I think there’s a number of opportunities that exist in the digital sports entertainment market; all of which I’m excited to experiment with.  More about some of those ideas here.  It wasn’t too long into thinking about these opportunities that it occurred to us that the 2012 World Junior Hockey Championships would be a fantastic event to learn as much as possible about these ideas.  Here’s a few of the reasons.

• Just enough customer acquisition – The event was held in Edmonton so we could leverage a lot of unfair advantages in getting just enough press to help acquire initial users – Good friends within local media (Edmonton Journal, Oilersnation), the Edmonton Oilers team, management, and radio personalities.  I was very confident in this customer acquisition hypothesis.
• Customer engagement – The event is held during the holidays, where people have nothing better to do than eat, relax, watch hockey, and consume content on their new iPads.
• Canada’s a bit off the grid – Ideas are a dime a dozen, true.  But the goal for this experiment is NOT to see if we can take over the world.  We want just enough sport fan users to learn what really drives them.  What they care about.  What engages them.  How and when do they interact with a tablet device?  Being in Canada allows us to be loud in Canada, but not make too much noise elsewhere..
• The emotion we’re trying to capture –This tournament engages an emotion unmatched by many other sporting events.  It’s hard to describe unless you’ve followed this tournament from Canada, but the tournament brings out an emotion in fans we’re looking to capture and learn as much about.  You just don’t see that emotion in regular season NHL, MLB, or NFL games.

A couple days into the tournament, we’re at about 1000 sports fans using a highly instrumented app.  A good start to getting some really solid data to help enable us make decisions moving forward.